The Agony of Education is about the life experience of African American students attending a historically white university. Based on seventy-seven interviews conducted with black students and parents concerning their experiences with one state university, as well as published and unpublished studies of the black experience at state universities at large, this study captures the painful choices and agonizing dilemmas at the heart of the decisions African Americans must make about higher education.

Nineteen sociology and political science scholars examine racial and ethnic struggles and tensions by helping the reader to begin to identify and define its characteristics. The essays include: the social construction of racial and ethnic difference, black ghettoization and social mobility, the lega